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The World War IIB-25 Mitchell bomber King Nine has crashed in the desert. Captain James Embry finds himself stranded, alone except for the wreckage and the mystery of what happened to his crew, all of whom have disappeared. The movement of the plane in the wind and his visions of the missing men serve to heighten Embry's disorientation.

Embry finds the grave of one of his crewmen and sees, in the sky, Navy F9F Cougar (Blue Angels) jets, impossible for the time. He collapses in the sand, and we discover that he is actually suffering hallucinations from a hospital bed, 17 years after the crash.

Confident that Embry will recover, two doctors discuss that Embry's suffering has been triggered by a newspaper headline. The paper has reported the desert discovery of the long-lost King Nine, which had not returned to base from a mission during the war. Having come down with a fever just before he was to board the ill-fated flight, Embry had been replaced on the mission by another captain. Embry's sight of the headline has triggered survivor guilt, in which, we are to understand, he has imagined himself at the crash site.

The doctors assure Embry he has returned to the site only in his mind. However, a nurse, handling Embry's clothes for the doctors, discovers his shoes are mysteriously filled with sand.

The episode was based on the discovery of the B-24 Liberator four engine bomber Lady Be Good and her crew's remains, which had crash-landed at night, deep in the Libyan desert after running out of fuel, while returning from a WWII bombing mission over Naples, Italy. In the episode, the marker of a grave of a member of the crew of King Nine is dated "5 April, 1943," the day on which the Lady Be Good was lost.

The scary and suspenseful score by Fred Steiner was later used in other Twilight Zone episodes.

This was the first episode to feature the familiar Marius ConstantTwilight Zone theme.